Because letting your child play with ammunition is a safe and rational thing to do.
Credit: AATTP.
In the days before the Internet, when pterodactyls ruled the skies and cavemen raised their daughters to become pop stars, we grew up hearing about the yahoos who warned us about the dangers of fluoridated water. Our precious bodily fluids were at risk from a Communist conspiracy to, well, do something unspeakable to us. Here, see for yourself.
We just laughed and laughed. Now, we find out that overexposure to fluoridated water can actually damage your teeth and bones. The likelihood of that happening is pretty small unless you guzzle gallons of tap water from your garden hose on a daily basis. (Doctors generally frown on doing that.) And the risk is more than offset by the beneficial effects of strengthening your choppers against tooth decay.
Enter the anti-vaccination crowd. Although there have always been a few grumblers on the fringe since long before Dr. Salk kept us all from getting polio, the “anti-vaxx” brigade really started revving their engines in 1998, when the charismatic snake oil salesman Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent study asserting that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubells) vaccine caused autism and bowel disease in many of the children who received it. The study caused a huge stir when it was released. But other doctors couldn’t figure out how Wakefield got his results, and when investigation showed that Wakefield committed gross ethical breaches and in his testing of children for the study, and stood to profit from his findings, his medical license was revoked and his study entirely discredited.
But, as always, there are plenty on the extremes of society who love to feel victimized by a Government Conspiracy to Do Us Harm. The “government conspiracy to give our children autism by making doctors inject them with devil juice” is in full swing throughout our credulous country. “Anti-vaxx” resistance to vaccinating kids has led to outbreaks of nearly-eradicated diseases throughout America:
- A lethal whooping cough epidemic has been roaring through California since 2010. Parents refusing to vaccinate their kids are directly to blame.
- A megachurch in Texas whose pastor, Kenneth Copeland, preached the gospel of anti-vaxx was hit so hard by a measles epidemic in 2013 that the church actually offered free vaccinations.
- Measles, whooping cough, and mumps are all swirling through areas of New York City because of militant anti-vaxx parents.
Now the anti-vaxx movement has spawned a kidnapping.
Megan Elizabeth Everett, a 22-year old diehard anti-vaxxer from Florida who lost full custody of her three-year old daughter Lilly, snatched the child from her father to avoid having the child vaccinated. Police are hunting for her. The last time Lilly’s dad Robert Baumann saw his daughter was on May 6, when Baumann dropped Lilly off with her mom for a week as part of the custody agreement. When the week was up, Everett didn’t show up with the little girl. Instead, she took it on the lam. What she did do was deliver a note with the following message:
You are a great dad. If I let them take her and vaccinate her and brainwash her, I wouldn’t be doing what’s right. I cannot let a judge tell me how my daughter should be raised. We will miss you. But I had to leave.
Now the FBI is looking for her as well as Florida authorities, because they are certain Everett has crossed state lines with her daughter.
Even Everett’s mom Pam Everett thinks Lilly would be better off with her father, telling reporters:
In the state of mind my daughter is in, Lilly would be better off with Robert. I have four kids, and Megan is my baby. I don’t know what happened to her.
And her anti-vaxx fixation isn’t the only, un, unusual aspect of Megan Everett’s world view. According to her mom, Megan Everett became involved with Carlos Lesters, a man news reports describe as “a Confederate-flag-waving gun enthusiast with family members in Georgia and Kentucky.” No evidence yet exists of Lesters’s involvement with the kidnapping. Lesters told police that Everett and Lilly were gone and were “not coming back.”
Not only did Everett not want her baby injected with demon juice that might turn her DNA into tapioca, she didn’t want her child indoctrinated in all that liberal education stuff. Baumann explains:
One of the issues we had was, she wanted to home-school my daughter. I didn’t want that to happen. She didn’t want Lilly to learn about black history. She just wanted her to learn about the Confederacy.
This was part of the reason why, when Baumann and Everett stopped seeing one another, Judge Steven Feren did not award Everett primary custody of Lilly. He said he was concerned about Everett’s newfound propensity to keep guns around in the reach of her daughter, and wrote:
It is however a troubling issue to the Court when the parties’ two year old child is living in a home with a mother and her boyfriend where the boyfriend carries a gun on his person throughout the day and where there are numerous other weapons and ammunition stored in the household.
Baumann planned on having Lilly immunized upon her return, and had her ready to enroll in preschool. But Everett was having none.
She found this new idea that vaccines are horrible. I think she wanted to keep her from being vaccinated because that would keep her out of day care.
According to the warrant for her arrest:
Lesters informed detectives that Everett … knew she would have to live her life as a fugitive. However, in her mind, the time that she spent with her daughter ‘free’ of Baumann would be ‘worth it,’ regardless of how brief the time was.
Baumann is worried sick about his daughter:
[M]y daughter deserves to be safe and happy, and I don’t believe being on the run is physiologically OK for a three-year-old. … I do fear for my daughter’s life. I do fear that she is not in a safe place. If she gets injured I don’t think that she [Everett] would seek medical attention.
It’s easy to mock and deride people like Megan Everett. It’s also easy to forget that while there is no evidence that vaccinations are responsible for a child developing autism, there are credible concerns about some of the effects some vaccinations have on their recipients.
But like fluoridated water, with our present level of knowledge, the risks of vaccinating your child are far, far outweighed by the benefits. Measles was once considered eradicated in America — now because of the hue and cry raised by the anti-vaxxers, it is on the rise again. The same with mumps, whooping cough, and other pernicious and sometimes lethal childhood diseases. The kids are the ones paying the price for their parents howling and slavering over the latest conspiracy theory — and not just their kids, but all the other kids (and adults) being exposed to these terrible diseases because of the ignorance, stubbornness, and credulity of our resident conspiracy mavens.
Children are dying because of the anti-vaxx resurgence. I dearly hope Lilly Baumann is not the next victim.
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page.
Published writer since 2001, focusing on politics, history, Web development, and other topics. First book is coming soon.
